Given this history, it is not surprising that the contemporary leaders of the religious right are blasé about reports that Trump cheated on his third wife with a porn star shortly after the birth of his youngest child, then paid her to be quiet. Despite his louche personal life, Trump, the racist patriarch promising cultural revenge, doesn’t threaten the religious right’s traditional values. He embodies them.

the politicized sectors of conservative evangelicalism have been associated with bigotry, selfishness and deception for a long time. Trump has simply revealed the movement’s priorities. It values the preservation of traditional racial and sexual hierarchies over fuzzier notions of wholesomeness.

But it seems absurd to ask secular people to respect the religious right’s beliefs about sex and marriage — and thus tolerate a degree of anti-gay discrimination — while the movement’s leaders treat their own sexual standards as flexible and conditional. Christian conservatives may believe strongly in their own righteousness. But from the outside, it looks as if their movement was never really about morality at all.

It’s harder to change the culture of harassment at corporations than they would have you believe. The story of Ford and their employees’ treatment of fellow female workers in the last twenty years is despicable. This is where culture change really needs to happen.

Women who work under these conditions who are told they are disloyal for speaking up have been failed by numerable organizations, not least of which: their unions.

The culture change we need is more than just fair treatment of women or even anyone other than white men. We need a culture change which says people are more important than profits. We have to embrace the belief that our citizens are our most important asset not our profit making entities. Along side this change will come an acceptance that marginalized groups like women and minorities cannot be mistreated in the name of capitalism.

much less attention has been focused on the plight of blue-collar workers, like those on Ford’s factory floors. After the #MeToo movement opened a global floodgate of accounts of mistreatment, a former Chicago worker proposed a new campaign: “#WhatAboutUs.”

Congress and state legislatures disburse emergency funds, which are then offset in budgets with cuts to social services and public spending. We are seemingly in a permanently reactive mode, with money often going to rebuild “back to normal” as though this is proof of bravery in the face of tremendous uncertainty. Recovery from previous disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, has had regressive effects, heightening the disparities between rich and poor and perpetuating systemic racism.

We should plan recovery and rebuilding projects that address local poverty and exclusion, rather than line the pockets of developers. We should commit expenditures to the kinds of projects that mitigate climate change, like clean energy and public transportation. And we should strengthen our safety nets so that when the next storm’s victims are picking up the pieces, they are not also worried about job insecurity, rising health care costs and precarious retirements.

It’s very hard to understand just how it is that our cultural norms change over time. It’s a bit easier to see how much they change, but we don’t have reliable data that goes back very far.

The staff here at NobodyisFlyingthePlane likes to think of the changes we go through in cultural norms as a natural part of our evolution as a species. It’s not biological evolution, we haven’t meaningfully changed in all of recorded history. But in that same period we have gone through an enormous cultural evolution, and from the looks of it we have a long way yet to go.

Changes in our shared values are important indicators of this evolution. Changes that occur within the span of a single lifetime are hard to adapt to. All of the bursts of evolution in our views on racism have been very violent. This is a tough value for humanity to swallow. Some humans are better adapted to accept changes. Some of these changes run contrary to our biological adaptations, especially our small group and tribal affinities. Views on race, ethnicity, and even nationality hit these walls often.

Humans adapted to survive better as groups than as individuals. The size of those groups varied with the availability of resources. When resources become scarce group affinities play an important role in the allocation of those resources.

Our species is deep in the process of redefining and reconfiguring traditional group affinities and the manifestations of racism and xenophobia we are seeing are a natural result.

We have a lot more skirmishes ahead of us in the culture wars, but the consequences are not trivial and they can’t be viewed simply as old values vs. new values.

The essence of what drives these battles is the conflict between egalitarian views and limited resources. The majority of humanity seems to have agreed that all humans have equal worth or value, but we haven’t yet agreed how to distribute resources in a manner that reflects that equality.

So long as we are still competing for resources we are going to form group affinities. We’re biologically coded to do so. Racism, xenophobia, and other us vs. them battles are losing favor as a means to define our group affinity. While they endure we need to look beyond just changing opinions about them. To really bring about an egalitarian society and celebrate this change in humanity we need to look at our systems of resource allocation and seek to change our economies to reflect our cultural values.

Today in the United States, sweeping majorities of the public say they support fair housing laws and the ideal of integrated schools. Nine in 10 say they would back a black candidate for president from their own party, and the same say they approve of marriage between blacks and whites. That last issue has undergone one of the greatest transformations in polling over the last 50 years. In 1960, just 4 percent of Americans approved.

When norms of acceptable behavior and speech start to shift, it can disturb the shared beliefs, values and symbols that make up our culture. “It’s really all of those things that we’re watching right now — they’re all up for discussion,” Ms. Sobieraj said.

When norms change, the highly educated tend to adopt them the fastest. And when political leaders agree, those attitudes spread through the population the more information people have about them. When political leaders don’t agree, attitudes tend to polarize (for example, liberals say climate change is human-driven; many conservatives say that it’s not).

Class, priveledge, and government handouts designed for whites have long been a barrier to the middle class for others.

[Rolling back Affirmative Action] implies that all that stands between hard-working whites and success are undeserving minorities who are doled out benefits, including seats at good schools, by reckless government agents.

In fact, today’s socioeconomic order has been significantly shaped by federally backed affirmative action for whites. The most important pieces of American social policy — the minimum wage, union rights, Social Security and even the G.I. Bill — created during and just after the Great Depression, conferred enormous benefits on whites while excluding most Southern blacks.

Southern Democrats in Congress did this by carving out occupational exclusions; empowering local officials who were hostile to black advancement to administer the policies; and preventing anti-discrimination language from appearing in social welfare programs.

Southern legislators introduced the same job category exclusions into other New Deal laws: the Wagner Act of 1935 that helped to expand industrial unions, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that mandated a 40-hour workweek and a minimum wage that explicitly left out agricultural and domestic workers.

Representative James Wilcox, a Depression-era Florida Democrat, explained the region’s position during the Fair Labor Standards Act debate: “You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it,” he declared.

When Congress passed the G.I. Bill in 1944 to help white veterans buy homes, attend college, get job training and start business ventures, it could have done the same for blacks. But at Southern lawmakers’ insistence, local officials administered these benefits. As a result, Southern blacks were left out, except for low-level vocational training. The law accommodated segregation in higher education, created job ceilings imposed by local officials, and tolerated local banks’ unwillingness to approve federally insured mortgages or small-business loans for African-Americans and Latinos.